Page 5 of Nikolay

His head came up. Whatever amusement had lingered on his face cooled. “Do not invoke the family to disguise your personal discomfort, brother. It does not suit you.”

I took that hit because protesting it would have made it sharper.

He went on, “She was hired fairly. She is good at the job. She wishes to be here. Your unease is not a business reason, nor is it grounds for me to uproot an employee who has done nothing wrong.”

“You are speaking of her as though she were merely another employee.”

“At present, she is.”

The cruelty of that lay not in dismissal of Maddie but in the simplicity of it. To him, whatever pull I felt did not override procedure. Perhaps he believed that discipline should triumph. Perhaps he simply enjoyed forcing me to stand in the consequences of my own silence. Either way, he would not yield.

“Lucia should have known better,” I muttered.

That earned me a faint, dangerous lift of his brows. “Careful.”

I exhaled through my nose. Lucia had known exactly what she was doing, likely more than I cared to examine. She had always loved with an almost tactical ferocity. If Maddie had confided some dream of leaving Texas, of finding a life not circumscribed by pack and family expectation, Lucia would have moved mountains to make it possible. My sister had crossed too many worlds herself to deny another woman the right to choose. And Maddie had been here several days before my father’s wedding, staying in the guest wing of the estate. I’d seen her every time I’d turned around.

And perhaps—this occurred to me with fresh irritation—perhaps she had looked at me and seen something I had failed to hide.

No, I refused that thought.

Bohdan’s office, like my father’s, had one wall interrupted by a broad panel of one-way glass overlooking the main floor below. From this angle, the club lay spread beneath us in controlled twilight: the bar lit like polished onyx, the low seating, the coils of conversation, the drifting figures of predators and prey and those who were both. I had avoided looking toward it since I entered. Now my gaze betrayed me and cut there of its own accord.

She was impossible to miss once I sought her.

A flash of bare thigh beneath the hem of that damned skirt. One hand braced on a tabletop as she leaned to set down drinks, smiling at something said by a patron whose face I did not care to identify. The movement lifted her hair off the line of her neck for one unendurable instant. I could not hear her laugh through the glass, yet somehow I felt it anyway: a warmth under my ribs that had no right to exist and all the rights in the world according to the brutal old law running through my blood.

She belonged to herself. That, more than anything, undid me.

Not ours. Not mine. Not this city’s. Not Texas’s. Herself.

And if she had chosen to stand under my family’s roof, in our club, within my reach and not my reach, then every instinct I possessed became both sharpened and denied.

She straightened and turned, tray tucked against her hip. For one impossible heartbeat, I imagined she looked up, directly toward the darkened glass, as if she could feel me there. Not likely. Yet my body answered the thought as though it were fact.

I dragged my stare back to Bohdan before he could watch too much of that weakness pass over my face.

The smirk had fully settled on him now, though there was something more observant beneath it. Less mockery than calculation. As if he were taking the measure of what, exactly, I would do.

I gave him nothing else.

When I spoke, my voice was almost quiet. “This is a mistake.”

“Possibly,” he said. “But not for the reasons you mean.”

My jaw ticked.

“If she wishes to leave later,” he added, “she may leave. If she proves unsuited, I will let her go. If there is an actual threat to her safety beyond the ordinary hazards of our world, I will address it. But I will not punish her because my older brother cannot look at her without forgetting how to phrase a demand like a gentleman.”

Under other circumstances, I might have admired the line. Instead, I wanted to put my fist through his desk.

The fact that I did not was its own form of suffering.

I stood there another moment, large enough to dwarf the antique chair before the desk, old enough to know better than to remain, and helpless as any young fool before the first disaster of his heart. No argument available to me remained honest. No honest statement available to me could be spoken.

I could have told him the truth then. Could have said, She is my mate, and I would rather cut the bond out of my own chest than submit to it. I could have watched the calculation on his face sharpen into something else. Perhaps into sympathy. More likely into interest.

I said nothing.